collective leadership

This article was originally posted on Interaction Institute for Social Change (IISC) (the webinar powerpoint is available here)

Picking up from Gibran’s post yesterday and continuing in the vein of follow-up to our LLC webinar on collective leadership, I want to respond to some of the questions we did not have a chance to answer or answer fully from participants, including requests for examples of collective leadership in action and inquiries about blocks and how to work through or overcome them.

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On Collective Leadership... read more »

• Curtis Ogden highlights four key concepts underlying the roots of the Interaction Institute's approach to collective leadership: epistemology, cosmology, ontology, technology.  Epistemology is that it’s not just about what we know, but how we know it – intuitively, intellectually, analytically. Cosmology is looking to the complex living systems and networks as the complicated reality we all live in. Ontology is the idea that each of us is evolving and capable of both learning and unlearning. Finally, technology/methodology is the idea of looking to the practices that create the best conditions for collective leadership. 
• Stowe Boyd discusses concepts from a Sara Horowitz’s talk on mutualism and creates a “mutualist manifesto”.  At the heart of the manifesto is finding common cause and growing mutual associations locally and globally, associations such as coops, unions, and policy organizations. Boyd thinks that associations supporting one another, governance by members, seeking benefits not profits, and cooperating in resource allocation will all make great headway towards directing change in a systemically chaotic world.

This article was originally posted on Interaction Institute for Social Change (IISC) (the webinar powerpoint is available here)

Last Tuesday, Curtis Ogden and I had the privilege of hosting an LLC webinar on collective leadership.  Much of what we did was point to observable patterns in ways of working together and how these tend to open up possibilities for shared leadership.  The metaphor of tilling the soil is most appropriate precisely because we have run up against the limitations of industrial implementation.  The appropriate response to increasing complexity is one that can get beyond linear causality and into a mindset of ecosystems.

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I had the opportunity to attend the ILA Conference in London last month. In fact, I have attended every ILA conference for the past 10 years with one exception … and I had a doctor’s note.  This year, the closing keynote by Keith Grint, a prolific leadership scholar from the UK, gave me an interesting new frame on leadership. Over the past two years LLC has been writing quite a bit about the need to expand our understanding of leadership as a collective process.  People rightfully remind us that the catalyst and individual role is essential and of course we agree. It's really one of those both/and situations where we need committed individuals, and we need them to connect their efforts with others to achieve more together than any one person, no matter how fabulous, could achieve alone.  Keith’s framework on wicked problems helped to provide more context to the “why” and “when” of collective leadership and pull together some of our thinking about innovation and systemic change.  

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Presenters: Curtis Ogden and Gibran Rivera, Interaction Institute for Social Change

Topic: If You Till It, They Will Come: Nurturing Collective Leadership

Date: Tuesday, January 17, 2012 11:00-12:00 Noon PST (2:00-3:00PM EST)

Much is being made these days of the Occupy Movement and its potential for showing us a new way to lead (we would call it leader-full, not leader-less). Prior to this important civic groundswell, many have been looking at how to create the conditions for emergent and collective leadership to move us in more just and life-affirming directions.  Given the complexity of the issues we face and the diversity of perspectives in our various systems, it has been recognized that we cannot rely on individual, expert, or command-and-control leadership to move us forward.  We must unleash more robust and adaptive collective intelligence.  For almost 20 years, the Interaction Institute for Social Change (IISC) has been building the collaborative capacity of change agents for greater social impact.  In this webinar, IISC Senior Associates Curtis Ogden and Gibran Rivera will explore stories of and practices for creating the conditions to unleash leader-full momentum that embodies and leads to the social change we seek. For additional information check out their blog post, Roots of Collective Leadership.
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Author: Alain Gauthier

I was pleased to receive the expressions of gratitude – as well as a number of questions, during or at the end of the webinar. Since there was only time to address a few of them, I will provide some elements of response here, following the chronological order of the slides I used (which are available on the GTE website http://globaltransformingensemble.org/ under the Videos and Presentations sidebar). I have regrouped some of the questions on the challenges of moving from a hierarchical culture to a shared leadership culture.

Q: Have you developed written principles or guidelines for collective leadership?

A: I wrote an article on collective leadership a few years ago, which became a chapter of the book Leadership is Global – published by the Global Leadership Network (http://www.globalleadershipnetwork.net/about/leadership.php). As indicated in the Resources slide of the presentation (page 37), this article “Developing Collective Leadership” is downloadable from the GTE website under the side bar Writings and Papers. It includes some principles, guidelines, and tools, which apply particularly, well to diverse leadership groups spanning several sectors – private, public, and civil society. At the bottom of the following page, I mention other resources that also propose principles and guidelines.

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Thanks to all the participants of today's webinar featuring Alain Gauthier.  During the webinar, Alain introduced an integral approach to collective leadership development and invited participants into an exchange on the following questions:

1. If you have experienced collective leadership, how do you find it different from individual leadership?
2. In your experience of collective leadership, what are some of the inner shifts in beliefs and attitudes that you have witnessed in yourself and others, in comparison to individual leadership?
3. What practices can be used to actualize collective leadership and access collective wisdom?

You can find the slides below.  Also, check out a blog post by Alain Gauthier, where he answers some of the questions that came up during the webinar. read more »

Karma Ruder is the Director of Community Collaboration at the Center for Ethical Leadership, an organization based in the Pacific Northwest that works nationally and regionally to cultivate leadership and build capacity for change, helping communities tap collective wisdom in service of the common good. She first became involved with the Leadership Learning Community (LLC) in 2004 when she attended a Creating Space meeting in Oakland. After that, she helped organize several learning circles in Seattle, and in 2006 was on the planning committee for Creating Space in Baltimore.

When Karma first met with LLC, she and her organization were interested in being part of a community learning more about collective leadership – specifically, the principles, intentions, and challenges of bringing diverse groups of people together. During the 2006 Creating Space planning session, understanding and promoting collective leadership was her primary concern. read more »

More and more people are talking about collective leadership these days. It’s hardly a radical idea because it makes sense as people think about how things really occur and the role of relationships in change. In fact, many leadership programs are now focused on supporting collective leadership that helps a group move to action. I wonder how many of these leadership programs are adopting a collective leadership model among their staff. When it comes to collective leadership there are a lot of skeptics who roll their eyes as if it can't be done in an organizational context without being bogged down in endless efforts to reach consensus with nobody accountable. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine what does not yet exist, but fortunately there are organizational innovators charting new territory with stories to tell. read more »

•      "Social Analytics Meet Community Engagement" 
        Author:  Allison Fine                                                                    
        Date:  July 26,2010
        Source:  A. Fine Blog
        URL:  http://bit.ly/cZ51Dy 

Allison Fine looks at how all the social media activity related to social causes translates into the actual on-the-ground activity necessary for social change.  She explores the question:  “What, if anything, does all of the clicking, blogging, and “friending” add up to in the end?”.  This topic, the one of how to both translate online exchanges into offline actions and measure the results (the connection between online activity and veritable social change), engenders a discussion, which, as Fine describes is in its “infancy.”   read more »